What a great name for a band!

A good story, for starters. Especially when you get to choose your own. We picked six Seattle bands whose names were so ear-catching that we had to ask: Where'd you get that? A dictionary. A TV special. An African safari. Who knew?

Read on for our answer to Behind the Music: Tell-all tales of the makings of local bands Carissa's Wierd, Dope Smoothie, Raft of Dead Monkeys, 764-HERO, Beautiful Soup and Ellen Says No.

Carissa's Wierd

The first time, it was a mistake. But then it stuck.

"We actually did screw up on the (first) flier, and everybody gave us a bunch of flak," recalls Matt Brooke, singer-guitarist and a founding member of Carissa's Wierd. "It was Carissa who insisted that if the band was going to be named after her, it had to be spelled wrong."

That puts to rest the debate over the "Wierd" part. Now who's Carissa?

Just a girl they once knew, growing up in Tucson, Ariz. "They" is Brooke and Jenn Ghetto, the band's other original member.

"She was eccentric, you might say," says Brooke of Carissa. "We grew a fondness for her."

Carissa's Wierd moved to Seattle in 1998 and has since added a violinist, a drummer and an accordion-playing pianist. Together, the five twentysomethings — Sarah Standard, Ben Bridwell and Jeff Hellis round out the group — play what Brooke calls "really scaled-down, mellow, depressing music." Musically, it's not really Carissa's bag: "She's a little more into punk rock and heavy metal."

We could tell you the story behind Seattle rock band Raft of Dead Monkeys. But guitarist John Spalding does it so much better:

"I was on this trip with my dad, and we were on a safari kind of thing in Africa, in this town in Nigeria. We were out in the middle of fields and stuff, and it was just like, I don't know, you grow up in the city and then you're out in the fields and you're out by the river and there's all sorts of animals ... I just thought of Raft of Dead Monkeys."

Got that? Maybe you had to be there.

"It's just pretty much a visualization thing," Spalding explains.

The vision hit him about four years ago. Two years later, he was sitting around with bandmates Jeff Suffering (bass), Davey B. (drums) and Doug Lorig (guitar), trying to come up with a name for their indie/modern rock group. Then there it was again: Raft of Dead Monkeys.

"It just came up and everyone went for it," Spalding says. "It fits us."

"As long as we have a name we don't hate, we'll just try to be a good band," says the vocalist-guitarist for 764-HERO. "You don't think of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones and go, 'Oh, that's a good name.' You just think of the band."

So when a friend suggested 764-HERO to the nameless trio — Atkins, drummer Polly Johnson and bass player Robin P. — before its first gig five or six years ago, they went for it.

"Polly was like, 'That's good. It's good to have something with numbers in it,' " Atkins says.

It was also good to have free advertising all over the freeway, courtesy of the phone number printed on signs to report violators of the HOV lanes: 764-HERO.

"I was actually worried at first that we'd get in trouble," Atkins says.

So far, the only run-in they've had over the name was in Santa Cruz, Calif., where a girl approached them at a house party and said she used to be in a band of the same name.

"We were like, 'Yeah, right,' " Atkins recalls. But it turned out the same friend had suggested the name to another band in Santa Cruz, where he went to school.

"He didn't think they were going to use it," Atkins says. "It's actually even cooler for a band in California because it's not anywhere near where they have the signs."